Archive

March 5, 2013

FEATURED BLOG

"Some Arkansas Legislators do the Time Warp; Pass Most Extreme Abortion Bill in the Nation," Hayley Smith, ACLU's "Blog of Rights": Smith highlights two antiabortion bills that advanced in Arkansas last week -- one bill (SB 134) that would ban abortion at about 12 weeks and another (HB 1037) that would ban the procedure after 20 weeks. "Seems like politicians in Arkansas want to send us back to a time before abortion was made legal nationwide," Smith writes, adding, "Until we can walk in another woman's shoes, we simply can't interfere with the difficult decisions that she might be faced with." She notes that legislators in Alabama, South Dakota and Texas also recently advanced abortion restrictions (Smith, "Blog of Rights," ACLU, 2/28).

What others are saying about attacks on reproductive rights in Arkansas:

"States With the Highest Teen Pregnancy Rates Lack Adequate Sex Ed Requirements," Rebecca Leber/Adam Peck, Center for American Progress' "ThinkProgress":Although "[t]een pregnancies have fallen to record lows," a new report by the Guttmacher Institute shows that the "decline is uneven across the country," according to Leber and Peck. According to the report, the states with the highest teen pregnancy rates -- including New Mexico, Arizona and Texas -- "have something in common: They have poor sexual education in schools, and consequently tend to have [a] lower rate of contraception use among teens." Thus, although the "decline in teen pregnancy is 'almost exclusively' a result of more contraceptive use," as the study suggested, many "states still emphasize abstinence-only sex education over contraception, when they do teach teens about their own bodies at all," they write (Leber/Peck, "ThinkProgress," Center for American Progress, 3/1).